Under Adultery's Shadow
Betrayed Vows and Invalid Secular Divorce
Glenn Braunstein
Marriage & Covenant

Under Adultery's Shadow

Betrayed Vows and Invalid Secular Divorce

Jesus of Nazareth said what he said. He was not softening his words for comfort, and he was not issuing a pastoral suggestion. This book works through those words in full — without escape routes, without softened conclusions, and without deference to what tradition prefers the text to say.

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About the Book

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people in American churches divorce their spouses and remarry. Most do so with the blessing of their pastor, the comfort of their congregation, and the conviction that God has forgiven them and moved them forward. Most of them were never told what the text of Scripture actually says.

This book says it.

It opens with the words of Jesus of Nazareth recorded in Mark 10:12 — words addressed specifically to a woman who divorces her husband and marries another. It follows those words through the full testimony of Scripture: through Luke 16:18, through Paul's language in Romans 7 and 1 Corinthians 7, through the ancient covenant structure that marriage creates and that no civil court has the standing to dissolve. It examines the historical legal record, including the Supreme Court's own statement in Maynard v. Hill (1885), that marriage is not a contract that the state can unilaterally terminate.

And then it names what the text names. A woman who divorces her husband and remarries is living in adultery. The man who married her is also living in adultery. Both are implicated. Neither can separate their situation from what Scripture declares it to be simply because a civil court issued a decree or a pastor pronounced a blessing.

This is not a book about condemnation. It is a book about accuracy. The conclusion is uncomfortable not because the author intended it to be, but because the text requires it. Every reader who approaches these pages honestly will need to decide what to do with what they find there.


Table of Contents

Section One — Words and Meaning
  1. The Words He Said
  2. What They Mean, Part One
  3. What They Mean, Part Two
  4. How She Got Here
  5. What the Church Should Have Said
Section Two — The Covenant and Its Breach
  1. The First Covenant
  2. The Garden
  3. The Nation
  4. The Pattern She Is Living
  5. What Marriage Is
  6. The Paper God Never Wrote
  7. The Courthouse Is Not the Temple
  8. What God Still Calls It
Section Three — What Remains
  1. Naming It
  2. What Repentance Requires
  3. Three Paths
  4. When There Were Many
  5. Two Kinds of Suffering
  6. The One Who Turns Back

Excerpt

The problem is not that the church failed to read the text. The problem is that the church read the text, understood what it said, and then chose a different answer for reasons that had everything to do with pastoral comfort and nothing to do with biblical fidelity.

The words of Jesus recorded in Mark 10:12 are not ambiguous. They are not obscure. They do not require a specialist in Greek or a shelf of commentaries to understand. A woman who divorces her husband and marries another commits adultery. That is what they say. That is what they have always said. That is what the church knew they said for the first several centuries of its existence, before the pastoral calculus began to shift.

And if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery.

What changed was not the text. What changed was the culture the church was trying to serve. And when a church begins to read its Scriptures through the lens of what its culture can accept, it has already decided that the text is not actually authoritative. It has decided that the text is a resource, to be consulted when convenient and softened when necessary.

Filtering biblical text through modern Christian tradition, that arose centuries after the New Testament era, cannot honestly be considered when interpreting the passages in context. This book does not do that. It reads the text as it was written, in the context in which it was written, and follows it where it leads.

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